Hanson: The new American Helots

Posted: June 14, 2012 - 11:45pm

Victor Davis Hanson

Syndicated Columnist

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs — half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta’s elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship.

Over the last few decades, we’ve created our modern version of these Helots — millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations.

Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about 49 percent) is the lowest since records have been kept. The cost of a four-year college education can range between $100,000 and $200,000 depending on whether the institution is public or private. Only 53 percent of today’s college students graduate within six years. Student time spent writing and reading in college has plummeted.

Annual tuition keeps rising, as it has over the last 50 years, usually at close to twice the rate of inflation. It must, if colleges are to pay for a vast new administrative class that is excused from teaching to monitor sensitivity and diversity, raise money, and comply with ever more race/class/gender federal mandates.

In addition, students support a new grandee class of professors who teach lighter loads, enjoy better benefits, retire earlier — and now offer instruction in a vast array of courses and disciplines that simply were never part of the traditional curriculum.

If today’s indebted students graduate later and are trained to be more “socially aware,” they also have diminished writing skills, fewer facts at their command, and less practical ability to survive in the private sector. So the higher-education paradox continues: borrowing more for a less valuable, more politicized education that takes longer, with waning ability to pay off the ever greater debt.

Often, first- and second-year students will take most of their classes from the new legions of part-time lecturers, who are on yearly contracts without much in the way of job security, pensions, benefits or status, and who subsidize the light teaching loads of the far better paid.

But our contemporary version of Helotage gets even worse. Desperate students now jockey for summer “internships” at public and private consortia — law firms, foundations, government bureaucracies and private companies. These internships neither pay much (if anything) nor necessarily lead to permanent jobs with the employer. They are not even quite medieval apprenticeships, which at least led to membership in a guild and future journeyman or master craftsmanship advancement.

At best, college students intern over the summer to hone “skills.” But isn’t that also a frank admission that standard college fluff such as a mandatory ethnic studies class, an Earth in the Balance course or a Construction of Manhood seminar is not seen by employers as proof of either erudition or marketable job skills?

So why aren’t Americans more worried about our new Helots?

Society has all sorts of ingenious ways of disguising exploitation. Record numbers of broke graduates are returning home rather than finding well-paying jobs and establishing their own households.

With room and board subsidized by parents, indentured 20-something youths who are interning or working part time can still approximate the thin veneer of the good life — possessing a car, cell phone and computer. The result is that college graduates without a job, a title or much income can appear affluent when they are on temporary leave from their parents’ basements.

Baby-boomer parents — the luckiest cohort in American history in terms of Social Security payouts, pensions and job compensation — often grumble that they are now rechanneling their disposable cash to their kids. The idea of inheritance has gone from a death benefit for survivors to an ongoing living subsidy from mom and pop. Permanent cash supplementation to Helot children is a new twist in parents’ retirement planning.

Overpriced colleges are rarely truthful about the new Helotage. For example, often they offer incoming students Club Med-like gym privileges: rock-climbing walls, aerobics and yoga classes, and hip weight rooms. Such glitzy distractions fool students into thinking that they are already part of the privileged classes — without awareness that upon graduation, few of the newly indebted will make enough to enjoy commensurate perks at private clubs on their own dime.

Strip away the fancy degrees, the trendy fluff classes, the internships with prestigious employers and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient indentured Helots.

■

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the just-released “The End of Sparta.” You can reach him by emailing author@victorhanson.com.

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All this misinformation in one convenient package; that's what think tanks are all about.
Baby boomers the luckiest- Victor most baby boomers have yet to see one dollar from social security.
What universities force students to take cultural, gender or race training? My children went to two of the biggest U's and never had to take this sort of class. Name those that do.
Colleges offering courses that oldies like us never had. Victor this is a computer, welcome to the 21st Century.
Only 53% of folks who start graduate from college. Decades ago I was in a lecture hall and the professor told us to look at the persons to our left and right. Then he told us that two out of three would be gone. Is 53 better than 33%?
No jobs for today's grad? The time when a good education meant a good job ended with supply side economics.

Here goes, brilliant! persuasive!, at the same time misleading, uses too many assumptions with too few actual facts and several very key omissions.

Hanson has a real talent for blending obvious parcels of truth with reasoning based based on unproven assumptions.

Probbly not what you hoping for though, huh. If taken a face value it aligns nicely with your worldview and education.

Seems a litttle vague on solutions too..........

Kids postponing leaving the nest during harsh economic times, surprising, shocking, just shocking......... And oh the presence of "cryp" classes, again shocking! Bet Hanson never took one, didn't he get a degree in history? Wonder if he could cut it in physics or computer science? Hmm,.......well he still gets paid a lot.

Amazing that Hanson's prescience can see 10-15 years down the road for the out of work down on their luck grads, I know I scored a 6 figure job right out of college, or not! Took me a few years, guess I'm just not bright enough.

Odd that he omitted that the bulk of bad student load is from the new "For profit" privatized colleges(many online only schools), but I know we all make our own decisions, and easy student loan money made it all happen, or did it? Hmm........too easy student loan money or just really poor regulation? Tough call.......

I attended a university aptly named U Can't Finish, and there is another nearby equally aptly named U Never Finish. I was just one semester away from getting my Bachelors when the 1% running the board of U Can't Finish decided that they didn't like being a commuter school anymore, and that it was more important to be on a sports level comparable to U of F, so they quit running the commuter classes that typically ran in the evening in favor of daytime classes, which of course as a self employed working person I was never able to attend. Now I'm no dummy I crammed my way through 21 credit hours at DBCC during "one" summer semester out of 24 I signed up for and had to get special permission to even do it because it was unheard of, I did have to drop one class to take again later because there were not enough hours in the day, but I finished the 21 with a B or above. Anyway The end result was I was never able to finish those classes or get my degree because the people running the school changed the priorities and there was nowhere else to go. Now here is something some of you are really going to like !! It took me a few years to pay off one loan but I paid it off early. The other one I got paid down to $2500 and then I quit paying because 1. The school wasn't running the classes, 2. I never got to finish my education. 3. It became outdated. I worked my [filtered word] off for it, I paid as much of it as i could myself, some was paid through my military service, some was paid through a unique scholarship that came simply from one of the 30 high schools they give to, of which one I attended and I had the grades, mom and dad also coughed up some but not near as much as for my sisters. Well I will be damned if i'm going to finish paying off the second one untill I can finish off my education, and now it will have to be brought up to date. I held up my end the other end did not hold up thiers. When they do I will start writing checks again.

Sounds like that 20 percent of the college grads today got a degree and little education.

There must have been a reason that your professor believed that only one of three could make the grade. I bet if he had done grade inflation, he could have got that number up to two! And that would have added 33% to tuition an fees for the school.

Now 1 out of 3 in the MLB would be worth millions. And if folks were hitting .500 in the MLB today, well then the mound must have been moved back, the base paths shortened, and only 1 outfielder. That would make it easier for the batter, eh.

Kind of like graduating with a major in one of those fill in the blank Studies majors. Do you think that additional 20% can "critically think"? Maybe ajm can tell us. I doubt if that is what employers are looking for today, a 22 year old that can think critically.